


kissed by a shadow haunting me

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [49]
Category: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Count Dracula/Jonathan Harker/Mina Harker, Captivity, Dubious Consent, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:06:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22441540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: Jonathan Harker spends his days in chains, refusing to sleep, and at night...
Relationships: Jonathan Harker/Mina Harker
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [49]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 73
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	kissed by a shadow haunting me

**Author's Note:**

> 049/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #92 – sanction.
> 
> Title from the Natalia Kills song “Stranger”.

“Oh, my dear, sweet husband,” Mina sighed from where she knelt on the floor by the bedside, turning the key in the lock of the great iron cuff that encircled Jonathan’s ankle. “I wish you would not be so cruel to yourself. You would be so much happier if you would only sleep during the day as the Count and I do. It is not so difficult to get used to, if only you would try.”

“You have told me so before,” Jonathan reminded her in a weary voice, “more than once.”

Mina looked up at him, her gaze plaintive, her expression close to distraught. 

It made something pang painfully in Jonathan’s chest to see such a look on his beloved’s face, but nothing was so painful to look at as the pale complexion of her that accompanied it, that which would make even the first snow of winter look dark, or the bright red of her lips colored so by the most heinous of sins or the hardness in her eyes, still foreign to him after all these months, that was lurking there even now behind the sadness and concern. 

“Then why do you not  _ listen _ ?” Mina demanded of him, full of sorrow. “Jonathan, my love, you look as if you have not slept in months. You are exhausted and it is an exhaustion of your own doing. If only you could see yourself!”

“I would love nothing more than for the both of us to see ourselves,” he replied somewhat crossly, a nerve struck at the accusation in her words, “but seeing as there is not a single mirror in the castle and your reflection would not show on any that might turn up, I am afraid we will both have to simply suffer to look at one another and leave our own unsightliness to the imagination.”

Mina’s face shuttered at his words just as a cruel little part of Jonathan knew they would. The hardness in her eyes got harder still, hard as granite, hard as flint. Her mouth twisted hideously in a way that made Jonathan want to turn away, for the woman he fell in love with, the woman he married, had never had such an expression cross her visage in her life.

And yet still, he felt guilt for causing her to look that way. Guilt for what he’d said, even as he knew his words were nothing but the truth.

Mina threw the iron cuff down with enough force that it made a loud thud against the floor and made even the chain it was attached to clink as it moved, too. She stood quickly, more quickly than any human being would be capable of, and began to pace angrily as one might expect a big cat to do. 

Bitterly, Mina asked him, “Is it not enough to be cruel to just yourself, that you feel the need to be cruel to me as well?”

“Madam, I am not the one who is cruel,” Jonathan said, and refused to flinch when she stopped pacing and spun to face him, a hurt look in her bright eyes and a sharp-toothed snarl on her mouth, though God knew he would have loved to flinch away from both. Hardening his resolve, he continued, “You are cruel to keep me here as this and you are crueler still to torment me with your presence night after night as though you are my loving wife and there is naught amiss between us, and that is to say nothing of the other cruelties you have subjected me to over these last months.”

“Jonathan, I  _ do _ love you! I am  _ still _ your wife!” Mina said, and oh, her passion as she said it was so real that Jonathan would have swooned to hear it at any other time, but still he saw her as she really was and knew because of what he saw that it could not be true, no matter how much he wished it to be.

“Is it love to keep me chained in this room day after day? Would a wife do such a thing? Because my wife – the Mina I met and fell in love with and married – she would never.”

“If I did not keep you chained, you would escape,” Mina defended, as if it made all the sense in the world and that he was the fool for not seeing it. “You are safe in this room and in my company or the Count’s company, but you will not be safe if you are roaming the castle or somehow get outside. If I could only trust that you would not try, I would love nothing more than to tear that chain from the wall and put it somewhere where neither of us would ever have to look upon it again, but I cannot! I do not keep you here to be cruel, my love, but only to keep you safe. As soon as I awaken every night, releasing you is always the first thought on my mind.”

“Not the first,” Jonathan denied quietly, his eyes dropping down to Mina’s red, red lips and the elongated white teeth that were biting into them. “Never the first.”

“I must feed,” she defended. “I can do nothing if I have not the strength to do it. You speak to me about love, but would a loving husband begrudge his wife the very thing she needs to survive?”

“ _ Yes! _ ” Jonathan answered with such a vehemence that it made Mina’s eyes go wide. “Yes, he would. You once made me swear to you that I would kill you rather than let you become as you are, Mina. I do not know if you can even remember it now –“

“I  _ do _ ,” Mina interjected just as vehemently. “I remember everything. I remember how we met and when we were married and the first time we made love as man and wife. I have changed, Jonathan, I know that, I have never denied it, but people change all the time. It is in the very nature of people to change and to become different from who they were when they were born, for us to change our minds about even issues that we once felt so strongly on. I may be different in some ways now, but I am still the same person in all the ways that matter. If I were the one who made you give your promise to me before, then surely it is within my power to release you from it now?”

Jonathan said nothing to that. He only looked away from Mina, down to the floor, and swallowed what felt like his very heart lodged in his throat.

Seconds later and with not so much as a whisper of pattering footsteps that Jonathan heard, Mina’s cool hands were cupping his face and tilting his head up to look at her where she now stood in front of him. She smiled down at him softly, as kindly as she used to do when they were first engaged.

“It is not so bad here, Jonathan,” she said so sweetly, so lovingly, her tone so at odds with the sharpness in her eyes that was like frozen shards of ice. “It is a beautiful castle in a beautiful country. You have the most delicious food, the sweetest wine, the softest sheets, and pleasures greater than any other man has ever known, greater than what any other wife would allow her husband to know.”

Jonathan flushed at the reminder of those pleasures even as his stomach churned with guilt and nausea at remembering them. 

Mina’s palms pressed more firmly against his cheeks, as though she could feel the rising blood in them and wanted her own skin to be closer to it.

“You would be so happy here if only you would let yourself,” she pleaded. “You would be so much happier with me.”

“With you and the Count, you mean?” Jonathan asked quietly and with accusation clear in his voice, vindictively hoping that the question would hurt Mina as he himself were hurting.

Mina was not hurt, however. Mina’s smile only widened as she said, “It is by Count Dracula’s permission than you are here, that I may keep you here. How can you hate him when it is by his leave that you are given so much?”

“How can I not hate him for what he has done to you?” Jonathan demanded. “For what he  _ still _ does to you?”

“Because  _ I _ do not hate him for it,” Mina answered earnestly. “I dare say I have never loved someone so much, except for you.”

Jonathan flinched at her admission, his already injured masculinity wounded by hearing his wife’s own voice saying she loved another man without a hint of shame or remorse coloring it – and for her to say she loved such a man as the Count! To say she loved such a monster!

“Do not be jealous,” Mina rushed to say, as though she could read his very thoughts. “My love for the Count does not diminish my love for my husband and you know he loves you as dearly as I do, Jonathan. You are losing nothing by having to share my heart with him.”

“Is my pride nothing?” Jonathan asked her, stung. 

“If you are proud of anything, be proud that he favors you so highly that he allows you to have that which he would never share with anyone else. You cannot begrudge him your wife when your wife does not begrudge him her husband, can you?”

Heat crept up the back of Jonathan’s neck and he bit his tongue harshly at her words, the feeling that bloomed inside of him at hearing them more like shame than pride.

Mina smiled at him, wrongly taking his silence and his flush both as acquiescence. Her hands slid down and off his face. 

“Come now,” she said, grabbing his hand and using it to pull him off the bed with strength greater than any small woman should possibly hold. “Let us not quarrel about this any more. There is dinner waiting for you and Count Dracula said he is in a mood to discuss history with you as you once did when you first met. We should not keep him waiting any longer, lest he think we have fallen into bed without him.”

Cheeks burning, throat tight with humiliation and shameful nerves both, Jonathan swallowed down the need to argue further. He knew by now that nothing would come of it but his own pain. He allowed himself to be led to the dining room with the sound of Mina’s sweet laughter ringing in his ears. 

It took everything in him to remind himself that she was not his Mina, not really. He had to repeat to himself like a mantra that she was only a fiend from hell who wore his wife’s visage and that the things she did to survive were too ghastly, too monstrous, to name – to say nothing of the things she had him partake in which were more sinful still.

With some fear, Jonathan realized it was getting harder to remember these things by the day. The edges of these reminders were becoming blunt from use, the horror of what Mina had become was harder to hold on to, the disgust he felt at this vampiric version of his beautiful wife and the awful Count receding with exposure, the shame he felt lessening to numb resignation.

Jonathan’s stomach twisted when he thought that some day he may not be able to remember that she wasn’t his Mina at all, that some day he may choose to ignore it simply because it was easier and less painful to pretend. His belly twisted even more still when he realized that thought came with a sinking sense of inevitability, as though it were only a matter of time before he truly gave in.


End file.
